India has recorded 78 doping violations in the first six months of 2026 alone – part of more than 680 adverse analytical findings logged since 2023. This July, the story became impossible to ignore: our Commonwealth Games campaign lost athletes before it even began, with judokas provisionally suspended and our weightlifting quota cut from 16 to 11 lifters because of violations recorded during the qualification window.
The headlines have settled on a single word: crisis. India, they say, has a doping integrity problem.
As a sports medicine physician, I want to ask a harder and less comfortable question. How much of this is intent — and how much is ignorance?
The numbers tell a more complicated story
It’s tempting to read a rising violation count as proof of a nation cutting corners. But the trajectory is jagged, not linear: 213 findings in 2023, 260 in 2024, a sharp drop to 131 in 2025, and 78 already by mid-2026. Anti-doping authorities themselves attribute much of the earlier surge to better detection — more in-competition and out-of-competition testing, sharper surveillance, more offenders caught who would once have slipped through.
In other words, a higher number can mean a system that is working harder, not necessarily a sport that is dirtier. That distinction matters enormously for how we respond.
Not every positive test is a cheat
When you sit with the case details rather than the headline, a pattern emerges. A significant share of these violations are not athletes chasing a shortcut. They are inadvertent — traced back to a contaminated supplement, or an ordinary over-the-counter medicine that no one on the support team flagged as a problem.
This is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon. Globally, as many as one in ten supplements is contaminated with a substance banned in sport — anabolic agents, stimulants, SARMs and other high-risk compounds that never appear on the label. And under the anti-doping principle of strict liability, the athlete is held responsible for whatever is found in their body, regardless of whether they knew it was there or intended to take it.
Read that again. An 18-year-old can lose years of their career, their medals and their funding because of a mislabelled protein powder they bought in good faith.
The supplement problem we don’t like to discuss
The standard advice is sound: athletes should only use supplements carrying an Informed Sport or Informed Choice certification, where every batch is independently tested for banned substances before it reaches the shelf.
But sound advice runs into hard reality.
Have we honestly looked at what certified supplements cost — and whether the athletes most at risk can afford them? The violations in 2026 cluster heavily in states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, and disciplines like weightlifting, athletics and bodybuilding. Many of these are departmental athletes for whom a strong result at an Inter-Railway or Services meet can mean a job or a promotion. Ask one of them to buy imported, batch-tested supplements every single month, and you begin to see the problem. Clean sport should not quietly become a privilege of those who can pay for it.
If the safe choice is also the expensive choice, we have designed a system that pushes vulnerable athletes toward the risky one.
The problem of blind trust
There is a second, quieter risk built into how Indian sport actually works: trust.
When a coach hands a young athlete a tablet, that athlete rarely cross-checks the ingredient list against the WADA Prohibited List. Why would they? The coach is the person who decides selections, playing time, and — often — their entire future. In that relationship, a supplement isn’t a pharmacological decision. It’s an act of faith.
So when a test comes back positive, we have to ask an honest question: was that a doping decision, or an act of trust that the support system failed to protect?
In one recent, sobering case, both the athlete and the coach were suspended — the coach charged with trafficking a prohibited substance. That should stop all of us in our tracks. It is one of the rare moments where accountability moved beyond the athlete’s body and reached the person who put the substance in their hand.
So where does accountability actually sit?
Right now, almost entirely with the athlete. The support staff who recommend, source and administer supplements and medications frequently carry no formal consequence when something goes wrong — even though they are often the ones making the decision.
That imbalance raises questions our ecosystem has not properly answered:
- What level of anti-doping education should be mandatory for every coach, physiotherapist and trainer before they are allowed to recommend a supplement or a medication?
- What accountability should support staff carry when a substance they prescribed causes a violation?
- Should certified supplements be subsidised or centrally supplied to our elite and development pool, the way some national teams already do?
- And most simply: who is teaching the coaches?
Integrity, or awareness?
I don’t believe we clean up Indian sport by testing harder alone. Testing catches the problem after the damage is done. It does nothing to prevent the 18-year-old from swallowing the contaminated tablet in the first place.
We prevent that upstream — by making the safe choice the affordable, obvious and well-informed one. That means education that reaches coaches and support staff, not just athletes. It means honest conversations about supplement access and cost. And it means building shared accountability across the entire team around an athlete, rather than leaving one young person to absorb all the risk.
So I’ll leave you with the question I keep returning to:
Is India facing a doping integrity crisis — or an awareness and access failure that we have mislabelled as one?
At The Performance Doctor, our multidisciplinary team — sports physicians, physiotherapists, strength and conditioning coaches and clinical nutritionists — works to keep athletes both high-performing and clean. Our Clean Sport approach is built on prevention: educating athletes and support staff, guiding safe and certified supplement use, and sharing accountability across the team. If you coach, manage or support athletes and want to build anti-doping literacy into your programme, get in touch with our team.
Written by Dr. Harini Muralidharan, Sports Medicine Physician, The Performance Doctor.